RE: Tuesday's discussions

[<A.M.Goldfinch@lse.ac.uk>]

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The following general classification of questions is from Rescher N. (2000), Nature and Understanding: The Metaphysics and Method of Science, p. 1:
 
Why questions ('Why is condition C realized?')
When questions ('When is condition C realized?')
Where questions ('Where is condition C realized?')
How questions ('How does condition C come to be realized'?)
Is-it-true questions ('Is condition C realized?')
Is-it-possible questions ('Can condition C be realized'?)
What if questions ('What ensures if condition C is realized?')

________________________________

From: owner-bups-dis@purplepancake.com on behalf of Matthew Hodgetts
Sent: Wed 23/08/2006 16:35
To: BUPS Discussion
Subject: Re: Tuesday's discussions


I'm not sure it is so easy to make sweeping generalisations across question words like that. Surely different interrogatives can be used for multiple purposes. After all, the choice of which interrogative we use (in English) will be somewhat arbitrary. There need not be any thematic consistency across all uses of e.g. "how?" (even if in fact there are).
 
In any case saying "seeking questions not answers", "seeking meaning" and " 'why' doesn't give you answers" are rather unclear, and seem to me to be so abstracted that I am not sure what it is that you are saying. In philosophy there seems to be a real tendency to become more general (perhaps we are interested in the most general rules), but I find that shying away from talking about specific concrete examples can indicate that what is being said is not in fact related to any particulars. I guess you do provide an example RE the fire. Perhaps "why" questions tend (but only tend) to search for explanations of what happened, rather than merely what happened, and perhaps explanations exist at different levels ( e.g. were I to sleep around a lot, but always use protection, an evolutionary psychologist tells me that I act the way I do because I want to have lots of children, although common sense would also partly explain my behaviour by saying that I do not want to have children) and are perhaps interest relative ( e.g. in response to "why did your arm move?" there are psychological, physiological, physical and biochemical explanations, but not all of these will be relavant in a particular context) and quite possibly explanations tend to be 'projectivist' whereas saying what happened is not. By this I mean that "WW II started in 1939" states what happen and would likely be in answer to a "when" question, but "WW II started because of lack of resources or economic problems or unhappiness over WW I" or whatever might be our trying to add some kind of psychological narrative (explaining why people acted how they did) to a set of complex events, each caused by many different things (everything causes everything), so that any explanation that can be given will likely be too simplistic, and thus in a sense false. 
 
Is this what you are getting at?
 
M.


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